Photography: a secret passion

You can't go travelling without a camera. It would be like taking no change of clothes - ok, slight exaggeration there.

My camera occupies a really special place in my life. Well, it lives in a case at the bottom of my bag but, nonetheless, it comes with me everywhere I go. This became a habit after I visited India for the first time in 1998. Although I was only 9 years old there were so many things I wanted to snap and put in a holiday album. Unfortunately, at that time I didn't have a mobile phone and I wasn't responsible enough to be trusted with a camera all to myself. What I saw and did during that holiday sits firmly in my mind as memories now.

I bought my first camera aged 11, it was a polaroid. It was big, silver and I pretty much took it everywhere with me. In all honesty I had got it for a spice girls (remember them?) concert I was going to. But, I ended up using it at every chance I could.

The polaroid was brilliant. A no-nuisance camera. You take the picture and it slides out the bottom on white polaroid photo-ready paper. It was simple and my photo albums were filled up very quickly. It's been over 10 years since I've seen the camera - it's tucked away in the storage room at home.

Since then I've happily moved on to many a camera. At the moment I have a silver Sony Cyber-Shot DSC S930 10.1 MP digital cam. It's small, compact and a bit worn out - now that I've had it for over two years - but, it does the job and it does the job well.

Photography is an area of interest that was born out of a travel experience for me. What I really enjoy is taking photographs of places, people, buildings, sign posts, food.... anything I find worth capturing on holiday. Although I'm no Peter Tsai, Matt Brandon or Basil Pao (some of the best in the game) I take pride in my amateur camera skills and occasionally, meaning very rarely, I take a shot that makes me think 'wow that's great' - when in fact it's probably just ok. But, that's alright with me because photography isn't really about quality and positioning and exposure for me, it's about what's on the other side of the lens and, more importantly, the memories that are sparked when I look at what I've captured.

Here's a slideshow of what I think are some of the best photos my sony cyber-shot has captured. I like to play around with these things so some of the photos have been manipulated in terms of colour and size. What do you think??

Showreel by Shabana Adam on Vuvox

The survey says...

Thanks to all those who completed the 'Travel Talk' survey I posted last week. It was surprising yet great to find that regardless of the financial crisis, over 80 per cent of you took at least one holiday this year and a few were lucky enough to take more than four. Strangely, it's the 18-24's who came out on top as every single person in that age group, who took the survey, had been on at least one holiday this year - as they say, this is the age group with the most disposable income (at 22, I would beg to differ).

There was no doubt about it that the majority of you, a whopping 80 per cent to be exact, preferred beach holidays with cultural (10 per cent) adventurous (5 per cent) and city breaks (5 per cent) just about making the cut.

I got some weird and wonderful answers for the most unusual item you pack to take on holiday, from old sentimental teddy bears to bin bags and bath ducks. However, the prize for most unusual item, hands down, goes to the person who packs, wait for it, a GAS MASK! You heard.

Showing your adventurous side (not!) 75 per cent said New York is the place they would MOST like to be right now - maybe the majority of you are either budding fashionistas or journalists, who knows? Sydney came in second with 10 per cent whereas 5 per cent would rather be living the fast life in India, followed by Cuba, Turkey and Tokyo (which weren't on my list but were chosen as 'other'!).

The survey also found that a majority of you are not too fond of staycations - well not in this partcular Lincolnshire town anyway. Surprise, surprise... Scunthorpe won the title for the place you would LEAST like to be. And in true brit fashion, half of you confessed that you go on holiday simply to relax and, secondly, to top up the tan!

Check out the pie charts below, displaying results to questions 7 and 8!

Thanks again for taking part.

It looks as though Scunthorpe's oceanic climate and industrial charm didn't quite appeal to many of you.

AND

Russia, the world's largest country, with the one of a kind St Basil's Cathedral, is another unpopular choice. 

The result speaks for itself...

Typical Brit holiday success formula - Sun for the tan, Sea for the fun and Sand...well to lay on and build castles. 

Oh, of course, don't forget to throw in a little bit of local culture!

Your holiday habits

Fill in the survey below and check back next week for the results.

Data driven journalism

“Journalism has always been about reporting facts and assertions and making sense of world affairs. No news there. But as we move further into the 21st century, we will have to increasingly rely on “data” to feed our stories, to the point that “data-driven reporting” becomes second nature to journalists.”

- Zach Beauvais

The above statement closely resonates with the work of American journalist and Freedom of Information activist,  Heather Brooke, who helped to expose UK parliamentary expenses. However, as a trainee journalist, the last thing that comes to my mind is data. Statistics are not my forte. I was terrible at maths in school and to be fair, I have managed to get through life knowing the basic - addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. So, imagine my face when, in digital journalism class, there was talk of mean, median and mode. Huh? I never thought I’d have to do averages again. Ever. 

But, my lecturer Andy Dickinson aka digidickinson put things into perspective when he said: “The mark of a good journalist is not knowing how to do everything, but, knowing whom to ask.” This statement alone was enough to get my attention.

In 3 hours, I learned that “data” can in fact provide interesting stories and is not as hard as it seems to analyse. The class began with looking at how to create forms and spreadsheets on Google documents and how these can be useful to obtain, arrange and visually display information or results. Andy taught us how to ‘scrape’ and ‘clean’ using html formulas.

Scraping

This is a way to get information out of web pages and in to a spreadsheet. Google docs also have a clever way to ‘scrape’ websites as part of their spreadsheet tool. It involves a simple copy and paste using a, not so simple, formula and wallah the data magically appears, from your chosen web page and in to your spreadsheet. Thankfully for me, I wrote the instructions down.

As a class we copied the table of results of the best-selling albums, off wikipedia (for practice purpose only) and transferred this information into our Google spreadsheet. Once the data is in the spreadsheet, you are allowed to ‘clean’ it in terms of getting rid of any errors. Depending on what sort of data you are dealing with, the super helpful formulas (and this I did find impressive) will help you find the average, or in mathematical terms, the mean, median and mode of your selected cells within that one spreadsheet - you just have to know the right formula to tell Google spreadsheet what to do.

It really is something that, I see, can help journalism, also, the formulas can easily be found on the internet so you don’t actually have to do any maths! 

The “daddy of data scraping”

Funded by Channel 4, Scraperwiki is a website predominantly for computer programmers to help data requesters and, right now, is the current fave among journalists as the go to place for data related information. As we discussed in the lecture, the relationship between journalists and programmers is important. In many cases it helps to serve the public interest, especially if the data in question can reveal valuable and newsworthy material, just as the analysis of MPs expenses did.

Meet Junar was another website that Andy introduced us to. Not only can you collect, organise and use data but it also contains data that you can explore and which might be of use to you. It also has a social element by allowing the user to share their data on social networking platforms. Now, this is more my cup of tea. 

The Guardian's DATABLOG, edited by Simon Rogers, a pioneer in data driven journalism, is a great place for inspiration when it comes to how to report stories based on data and more importantly how to present the data in visual form. More recently, the DATABLOG, published a world map dotted with the occupy protests, which on it's own painted a powerful story. It goes to show that data can be used in so many different ways.

Visualisation

How do you present data in an engaging yet simple form? This part I didn’t mind. Bar charts, pie charts, line graphs and tables – they all work well with stories based on facts and figures. This sort of traditional visualisation of data goes hand in hand with stories about growth, decline, change, comparison and ranking. However, if you want to opt for a more simplistic yet effective way of telling a story then take a look at Wordle.net – a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

wordle.net is free and easy to use                  Zoom in

Check out the word cloud above which I created on Wordle.net using a story, headlined, Hamid Karzai tells loya jirga: no US military pact until night raids cease, from the Guardian's website. 

The most prominent words in the news report are Afghan, Karzai, military, night, raids, partnership, sovereignty, national, Afghanistan, strategic and operations. The word cloud instantly portrays the angle and of this story and you now have a good idea of what's written in the full report. 

By the end of the class, I felt much more comfortable about having to analyse and organise data for journalistic use.

Learning that I made the right choice

Check out my (poor) attempt at reading and editing news, emphasis on the word poor. This was part of an exercise during the digital journalism module. The idea was to record an original piece of video and edit it using Adobe Premier Elements. It didn't help that I was recovering from a flu when I braved it to face the camera and report a few environment stories from Preston - environment being my beat and Preston my place of study.

Initially, this exercise seemed like a chore. But, it was a task that made me realise a number of things:

1) I'm sure, more than ever before, that print journalism is what I want to be doing. Broadcast is definitely not for me.

2) Setting up a camera to film raw footage is much much harder than it seems and speaking into one is near enough torture - I salute the people who do it on a daily basis.

3) In the worse case scenario, if push came to shove, I am capable of filming something - just not of a great quality. 

4) I, surprisingly, enjoyed the editing process and found Adobe Premier Elements as a great tool for video production.

5) Not having an auto cue proved extremely difficult, I was constantly looking down to read what I had to say which was unprofessional and amateur and definitely wouldn't cut it in the real world.

6) I should definitely stick to hiding behind the written word. In simple terms - I look terrible on camera!

This was also the first time I made use of my YouTube account so... Here's the video - I've made a number of mistakes - see if you can spot them!

                                                            

It's Eid... Let's Eat!

Today is a special day in the Islamic calendar, Bakra Eid, also known as Eid-Ul-Adha, which is celebrated with great enthusiasm by Muslims all over the world. Bakra Eid is the “festival of sacrifice”, an occasion when Muslims pay thanks for their good fortune by sharing and giving to the less fortunate. It also marks the end of the month during which devout Muslims make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Traditionally, Bakra Eid, which falls approximately 70 days after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, is marked by the slaughter of animals as sacrificial offerings, known as Qurbani. The meat is then distributed among the poor.

During the two-day festivities Muslims offer prayers at the mosque, wear new clothes and visit the homes of their nearest and dearest. One of the key ingredients of the celebrations is the delicious food, which includes sweets, desserts and beverages, cooked for family and friends. We’re not talking your usual curry or kebab. Surprisingly, many people outside the Islamic world are unfamiliar with common Eid foods. So, what is eaten during Bakra Eid?

The answer is, a little bit of everything. From lamb stew (gosht salan) to sweet rice pudding (kheer) to fish kebabs. A variety of food is prepared with a fusion of different cultures including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arabic. See for yourself below!

Showreel by Shabana Adam on Vuvox

Travel Talk: Bahrain

How excited was I when I learned that one of my fellow classmates is an expat who grew up in Bahrain?! Very excited. So I took the chance to speak to Katy about cultural differences between the UK and Bahrain and exactly why you should visit the Pearl of the Gulf.

by Shabs_A

Follow Katy's blog for more info about Bahrain and tips on what to do when you get there.

The best travel experience

I have been lucky enough to visit some incredible places including India, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, to name but a few. My fascination with travel began at a young age, which is also one of my earliest memories as a child. I remember clear as day, walking onto a ferry aged 4, to cross the channel and visit family in Holland.

I remember being mesmerised by the water all around when my gran picked me up to look over the edge. Since then travelling has become an innate obsession. Although I've experienced some wonderful countries, my most treasured time abroad was last year on a three-week volunteer project to Marrakech.

I found myself browsing the photos from this trip on my Facebook profile today, so I thought I'd share some of those memories with you all. Check out the collages below, of my favourite pics that I took on the trip. All of them represent a memorable day or special moment!

From top left: Doors into Koutoubia Mosque, My first meal at Djemma El Fna square, Ouzoud Waterfalls, Me at the top of Ouzoud before our walk down, Me and Antony (another volunteer) at the boys orphanage, fishing boats in Essaouira.

From top left: Cabanas at Nikki Beach hotel where sex and the city 2 was filmed, Me standing on the fort ruins of Skala de la Ville in Essaouira, Oversized babouches, Me in front of the mighty Ouzoud Waterfalls, Stalls in Djemma el fna square selling dried fruit and nuts, Volunteering at a day care centre in a berber village, Koutoubia mosque minaret, Horse drawn carriage in Marrakech, Windy beach at Essaouira Bay, Beautiful intricate architecture at Palace Bahia.

Collages created on photovisi and collageIt

Find out more on volunteering in Morocco

Do vampires suck?

Like them or loathe them, vampires have become a TV phenomenon in recent times with most being gorgeous rather than grotesque. Unlike the mere mortals of the telly world, the zeitgeist dominating undead have a definitive allure of immortality, animalism and torment that modern day viewers find exciting. These vampiric traits have led a number of TV shows to huge success – moving well away from the days of Count Dracula.

The nocturnal neck nibblers have made a quick transition from literature to TV  and audiences have done nothing less than praise their dangerously seductive lifestyles.

As for the question of do vampires suck? - Yes – they do, a lot, for survival that is. However, the current generation of TV viewers find vampire antics obscurely inspiring for a story line – I’m one of those people and having watched various vamp motivated shows, I can safely say, vampires do NOT suck – only when they’re hungry!

Here are three of my fav vampire shows to hit our screens to date

An international cast dominates this vampire world -

Image courtesy of Claire Schmitt

True Blood

Sex and sin in the deep southern state of Louisiana. Charlaine Harris's books, Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries novels are brought to life by creator and producer Alan Ball, through a pleasurably escapist plot. Out-of-the coffin vampires trying their fangs at mainstreaming with werewolves, shape-shifters, witches, homosexual drug dealers, devil healers, double standard politicians and the protagonist - a telepathic waitress. It's raw and sultry with crude humour, spine-tingling horror and poisonous heartbreak. True Blood airs for its 5th season on HBO next summer.

The vampire TV reign started with Buffy in the 90s - 

Image courtesy of Phillipp Lenssen

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

For all the vampires she staked  there was always the perilously handsome Angel and devilishly hunky Spike. Seven seasons and thousands of super stunt kicks later, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s iconic character came to an end. For the time she and her band of sidekicks graced our TV screens we were introduced to demon hellmouths, high school drama, unforgivable curses, black magic, first love and in the case of her nerdy best friend Xander, unrequited affection. Buffy and her crew were your not-so-average everyday students, saving the world from unfathomable mysteries and a dangerous group of crimson tide connoisseurs, i.e. seriously dodgy vampires.

The Vampire Diaries

Dashing brother duo Stefan and Damon Salvatore (Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder) are relatively new to the TV vampire army. Their sharp teeth, perfect cheekbones and smoky predator eyes makes it hard not to watch the Vampire Diaries, based on the popular book series by L.J. Smith. Mystic Falls is their paranormal hometown of supernatural activity, again, with an abundance of mythical creatures like the vampire’s oldest enemy, werewolves. The brothers are on a continuous battle of good vs evil alongside fighting for the attention of a high school hottie – Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) who also plays her feisty vampire doppelganger Katherine. The toxic love triangle and cliché question of will they won’t they works to the advantage of the show.

 If your not into vampires - watch it for the ridiculously

 good-looking cast - Image courtesy of Cristian Krause

Check out the official trailer for The Vampire Diaries episode titled 'Appetites', on the CW. From this 30 second clip it's easy to understand why the supernatural world of vampires is so enticing - obsession, seduction, temptation and pure escapism, what's not to love??! Enjoy!                                                                                                                    

Official episode trailer uploaded by the CW network's YouTube page

Michael Palin: Top 10 Travel Documentaries

President of the Royal Geographical Society and one sixth of the legendary comedy group, Monty Python, funny man Michael Palin is one of the most influential documentarians around. Having journeyed across the world, his travel programmes are widely recognised as phenomenons creating the 'Palin effect', as many areas he visits suddenly become popular tourist destinations. 

He has visited some of the world's most beautiful and most intriguing places. What I love about Palin is his curiosity when it comes to experiencing other cultures and his desire to learn more about the place he's in, from the people he meets, on his travels. He also has a great flair for travel writing and an informative yet completely entertaining nature in which he presents his extraordinary adventures to the viewers at home.

Here are my top 10 travel documentaries with Palin

1. Sahara with Palin - 2002
2. Michael Palin: Around the world in 80 days - 1989
3. Full Circle with Palin - 1997
4. Pole to Pole - 1992
5. Himalaya with Michael Palin - 2004
6. Michael Palin's New Europe - 2007
7. Confessions of a Trainspotter - 1980
8. Around the world in 20 years: 80 days revisited - 2008
9. Derry to Kerry - 1994
10. Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure - 1999

One of my favourite stills taken from the number one on my list, showing a sunset on the way north through Algeria
  Photo by Basil Pao

More on Palin's travels 
Palin's time as a Python

Digital journalism tools

Every day I trawl through dozens of sites to get the latest news, travel tips and music reviews. For as long as I can remember, I have always noticed the little orange box in the corner of a web page yet steered well away from it with the firm belief that RSS feeds are too technical for my liking.

It turns out that I could be saving myself a lot time if I was brave enough to explore the mystery behind the little orange boxes. As our own digital guru, Andy Dickinson, a.k.a digidickinson, explains, RSS feeds are in fact simple to use and wonderfully convenient at saving you time. In a 3-hour digital journalism class he introduces us to Google Reader. It allows you to subscribe to numerous RSS feeds, i.e. the little orange boxes on a website, from where you must copy the RSS link and paste it into your Google Reader profile. This means that you now get all the information you want to receive in one place as Google Reader filters information from your favourite websites, updating you with the latest content from each, based on the order it is published.

What’s even more useful is that you can group your feeds into appropriate folders to optimise your browsing in one feed. For example, I have a ‘Travel News’ feed where I have subscribed via RSS to National Geographic Traveller and Guardian Travel. As my beat for my practical journalism module is environment, I also subscribed to the environment sections of the BBC and Preston’s local paper, the Lancashire Evening Post. The feeds from these sites are grouped under ‘Environment News’. So now, instead of visiting dozens of websites, I just log into Google Reader and the content from my subscriptions is there, ready for me to browse and read, and even star articles that I wish to come back to later. I’ll be clicking the little orange boxes more, now that I have discovered Google Reader.

Diagram shows how RSS serves as the mechanism for syndication and aggregation of RSS-enabled Web content - meaning that RSS feeds are useful for online users and beneficial to publishers too. 

Illustration by Jason Rhodes

Digidickinson then moved onto Delicious. The basis of this site is to collect links that you find worth sharing. The site offers elements of social networking whereby users are able to search, view and share each other’s lists of links. These lists can include the most unusual content such as ‘Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide’ to more special interest links such as ‘Mosaic Sculpture Gardens’. Once more, this site is a useful time saver. You can search any topic and a pre-made list of links will present itself to you. Furthermore, if the links are on Delicious, then no doubt, an online user thought they were worth sharing and could prove more useful than 750 pages of Google or Bing results.

Then, we go onto Trunk.ly, a social bookmarking tool that fulfills the users needs for ‘data curation’. Its homepage reads –‘…the easiest way to save links online’ – and that is exactly what it is. Great for storing links to things on the web you may want to return to later – and especially great – because you can access these links from any computer, unlike a bookmark, which is specifically saved to your own laptop. Trunk.ly also remembers any links that you share on your online platforms, whether that be on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or even Google Reader. All your links are stored here so you don’t have to trawl through your internet history to find them again. 

Enter Twitterfeed – an online (re)distribution tool that acts as a self promotion platform. Twitterfeed will automatically tweet new posts that you publish onto your blog. So, once I’ve written this, my humble following of 600+ tweeps will see a link to this very post on their timeline. The most exciting online platform that our digital mastermind introduced us to, is something he uses to inform his students of his whereabouts – incase they struggle to cope with him not being in his office. He does this through ifttt (if this then that). The site automates feeds based on trigger events. These commands can trigger by dates and times and link to other social network platforms. For example, digidickinson will create a trigger that on Thursday afternoons between 12-3, his twitter page @wheresandy will post a tweet that reads, ‘I’m teaching postgrads til 3pm’. Obviously, very useful for the long queue of undergrads waiting to see him!